Finally, finally, finally, after four years of waiting, drooling, and pining, I was able to buy one of these. And all I had to do was lose my job.

(Well, okay, and then find another job before the severance ran out).

Update: thanks, Mike! I’m definitely open to suggestions for favorite Mac programs!

As a follow up to my goal of boosting our Google rank for the words “greenwich village,” it occured to me while hacking some site templates that a very minor tweak could possibly reap some huge benefits. If you check out the site for a moment, you’ll notice The Village Church logo at the top of the page.

Typically, this kind of thing would be placed on the page using something like a CSS background-image or perhaps an <img> tag. But, for some semantic bonus points, I’m using a method that’s somewhat like Fahrner Image Replacement (design geekery here) to display an image inside of an <h1> tag. You can view the page source to see what I’m talking about. The upshot is that while people see our logo, Google sees the text embedded in the header which, until today, has been “The Village Church.”

The beautiful thing is that I can place whatever I want in that header tag and Google will take note without disturbing the human user on the site. Even better, this header is contained in one include file for the whole site, so I can change this text in one place and see the effects across the site. Sweet. The header (and its title, for what that’s worth) now read “The Village Church in Greenwich Village.”

A lot of thought went into the site architecture when I was doing this redesign–it’s always nice to see a good design carry forward benefits into situations like this.

So, there’s a new free Google product available for download called the Google Accelerator. It’s available here, but you’d best to let this one pass you by. The accelerator uses a concept called a proxy to store web visited pages and “prefetch” others that you might visit, giving you the perception of a faster online experience. Aside from the security concerns over passing all of your personally identifiable traffic and browsing information through one company (though one could argue that your ISP technically does this, too), the accelerator also caches files that may contain vital information that you might pass along the web, such as your back account number.

What’s worse is that Google’s method of prefetching links — downloading all the links on the page that you might click on — has the unfortunate side effect of breaking some web applications (via). For instance, if your using a database application with a “delete database” link on the page, well, when Google prefetches the link, it deletes your database for you. Bad news bears.